The idea of a low door in a wall that leads to a different world has long
captured our imaginations.

Lewis Carroll recognised an item that belonged in Wonderland when he saw it. He introduces the low door, you will remember, during the incident with the glass table, the golden key and the bottle labelled DRINK ME: “Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw.”

In 1911 (50 years later), HG Wells published what would become his most famous short story, “The Door in the Wall”. This took the form of a narrative related by Lionel Wallace, cabinet minister, telling an old friend how, as a five-year-old child wandering the streets of West Kensington, he once chanced across a green door let into a white wall. Entering it, he found himself in “an enchanted garden”. There were monkeys and tame panthers and a kindly girl and all the friendly playmates that, being lonely and motherless, were absent from his own existence.

The door in the wall haunts Wallace as he grows up. Over the years, he comes across it again as he hurries here and there, though it never seems to be exactly where he remembers, and he always sees it at moments when, for some reason, it’s impossible to stop. After relating this story to his friend, he declares his determination, if he ever sees the door again, to enter it without fail. Shortly afterwards, his death is announced. It’s reported that he inexplicably entered a door in a wall which opened onto the deep shaft of a building site, at the base of which his body was discovered.

Memorable as it is, if this story has a familiar ring, it’s because the idea of a door in a wall leading to an enchanted garden was plainly in the ether. That same year, Frances Hodgson Burnett published her children’s classic, The Secret Garden, in which the orphaned Mary is led by the singing of a robin to the eponymous hidden garden, which proves, like Wells’s, to be bursting with healing and redemptive powers.

Three decades later, in 1945, came Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Early on, Charles Ryder muses over whether to attend lunch with Sebastian Flyte at Christ Church:

“But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognised apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.”

It was a coming-of-age moment for this most poetic of architectural features. Low doors, easy to guard and control, are of course as ancient as city walls and, indeed, secret gardens. But henceforward their wonder and charm, of which everyone was probably already half-aware, was outed. Now, in our imaginations, they would also represent the way to those most inaccessible places, such as ideal childhoods or parallel, more exciting universes. Whether or not we discover such metaphorical low doors, we feel, determines nothing less than how much we get from life; whether we just skim helplessly over the years until the coffin lid closes, unaware of what life has to offer, or whether we successfully milk it for everything it’s got.

No wonder, then, that gardeners like low doors. Here is a feature positively groaning with symbolism, association and meaning. There have been other portals to secret gardens – the back door in Tom’s Midnight Garden and the wardrobe to Narnia spring to mind – but none so beguiling, following Carroll and Waugh, as the low door. Its conception is so pleasing. Swagged and half-concealed by climbers running wild, its paint blistered and peeling, its lowness forcing the adult to stoop to enter, thereby becoming a child again: what buried longings wouldn’t be stirred by its rusty latch and creaking hinges?

Best of all, there’s a prototype. The Low Door of low doors, the door that inspired Carroll and Waugh, actually exists. Dark green, piercing a high wall of Cotswold stone, it leads into the Dean’s Garden of Christ Church, Oxford, the college where Carroll was a young mathematics fellow and Sebastian Flyte an undergraduate.

Not that where a low door leads matters much: it’s the notion that’s so exciting. In the 20th century, the social changes wrought by two world wars helped condition us – assisted, obviously, by F. Hodgson Burnett – to the idea that secret gardens are places of wistful dereliction. But having alighted on a portal to paradise, who would quibble about what follows?